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The tools and apps we use for powering up Sendloop

Written by Cem Hurturk on October 11, 2013

Instead of discussing email marketing, I want to share some insight on how we work at Sendloop.

The Sendloop team is a remote team (this is going to be a popular term this year!) that is spread across three continents and four countries. There’s a minimum of 5 hours between the closest team members.

Therefore, it’s essential to use “smart” and “efficient” tools in order to keep our team up and collaborative.

Sendloop is highly scalable. I’m not just talking about infrastructure. We’re scalable in all areas such as:

Team communication

Hardware

Customer support

Email delivery

If we were otherwise, we would have thousands of unsatisfied users.

Tools We Use for Team Collaboration

Trello is a great way to keep things organized within a team. From development to blogging; from shopping to office discussions, everything is organized.

The best part about Trello is your team members can join and collaborate. For instance, they can vote, move cards, add new suggestions, etc. Trello is free and highly flexible.

Hipchat is a terrific way to be connected to all your team members. You can create different “chat” rooms and discuss different topics with them. You can also do the same with your customers.

The best part of Hipchat is its connection to our internal control system – thanks to Zapier. This connection enables team members to get notified about certain victories and cases.

LucidChart is an easy-to-use and full featured diagram tool. Our new features, interfaces, and conversion funnels are modeled on LucidChart before implementing them to Sendloop. Team members have a chance to get involved in the design process and express their thoughts.

Stash, which is from Atlassian, is a wonderful application. As host of our Git/Mercurial repositories, it enables our developers to get codes, make changes and deploy them. It also provides useful statistics about code deployment and conflicts. Just like other Atlassian tools, Stash is our core tool for development and developer collaboration.

Google Drive is the service we use for the following purposes:

Documentation (sites)

Word processing (documents)

Spreadsheets

Its team collaboration features are amazing. We can perform the following team procedures on it:

New team member onboarding

Code deployment

Weekly and monthly reports

All of these can be created and stored on Google Drive.

Tools We Use for Customer Service

At Sendloop, customer service is the most important operation. In fact, our friendly and personal customer service is the reason we have thousands of customers.

Given its importance, the tools we use for customer service play a very important role in our success.

Helpscout is an amazing customer support tool. The best part about Helpscout is its transparency.

Basically, there’s no helpdesk between us and our customers. Our customers can easily contact us by sending an email to hello@sendloop.com.

When we reply back to customers, they will receive a regular reply with no ticket number or link to a help desk login.

In other words, expect just a simple email from us. This increases the conversation and satisfaction rates a lot more than helpdesk.

Intercom is another cool tool that we use to display “in-app” messages to our customers on certain conditions, such as when a plan upgrade occurs, or when a new feature gets released. We receive good conversion rates with in-app messages. Intercom also has features that allow us to communicate with our users via messaging.

Olark is our live-chat tool. With the help of Olark, we are able to do live chat sessions with our visitors and leads on the website. This dramatically increases our conversion rate. In addition, it ensures visitors that there are real human beings behind our website and application.

Analytics and Monitoring

Our company is an analytics driven team. We track every single metrics that we can measure. However, we always focus on one metrics at a time: OMTM (Only Metrics That Matters). We use different tools for different purposes.

Pingdom is an excellent way to monitor your server uptime rates. It monitors your servers and alerts you whenever a downtime occurs.

Sendloop is a critical service that should never go down. Therefore, we always do our best to keep our uptime rate above 98%.

I don’t know if there are any websites that doesn’t use Google Analytics these days. We use Google Analytics to get useful data about visitors and their behaviors; and traffic sources.

Mixpanel is great for many uses such as:

Measuring the success of your funnels

Determining about less converting funnels

Tracking events

It’s even great for user retention for action regarding the application. Without Mixpanel, we’re on blind about what we do!

Visual Website Optimizer is a superb and easy way to run a/b and multivariate tests on your website and application pages. We run several “weird” tests on our website.

For example, we play with the color of the signup button, change texts and try entirely different landing pages. All of this is done to see which tests result in better conversions.

And last, but not least … Cockpit. This is our internal application, which allows us to monitor and control every single parameter about Sendloop.

Cockpit is our core application for:

User management

User activity tracking

Email delivery monitoring

Reporting

In addition to all these cool apps and services we use, we are using some other tools such as:

Gmail

iMessage

Google Hangouts

Skype

What kind of tools and services do you use every day in your business? Comment and let us know.

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